Eating the Cats and Dogs

Do not worry about the Cats and Dogs.  Vote.

 

It is manifestly inconceivable, yet here we are on the cusp of the election with the possibility of a depraved scoundrel who has perverted the American experiment with a good chance of being re- elected President of the United States of America.

 

I have voted in every presidential election since 1960, and I have never experienced America in such turmoil, existential angst, a mixture of rage and fear. Even during Vietnam. Even during Watergate. Nine years of Trump since he came down on the golden escalator.  Enough already.

 

On the one hand, Trumpists believe that their cult of personality has the keys to saving the republic.  That despite all the hate and fear mongering emanating from his supporters, that Kamala Harris, a woman, a black woman, represents more of a threat to the nation than Trump.  Even if one thinks that Harris lacks the gravitas to be president, one must  cling to the hope that she will be able to restore a sense of normalcy to our politics.  Yes, Biden hung around too long and she was anointed without going through the primary process.  And yes, they gaslighted us by saying old Joe was fine.  And yes maybe there could have been a more perfect candidate. But those possibilities pale in comparison to the threat of Trump’s disrespect for the rule of law, for the constitution. No other argument need be advanced.  For God’s sake, he tried to overturn the election, to provoke a coup d’etat.

 

Surreal that Trump, after shattering all norms of political and civil discourse, after demonizing half of America could be returned to the White House, threatening to deport 12 million people.  No one can even understand what a disruptive force that would be to almost every walk of life.  Trumpers do not dare talk about what a budget buster that would be. How many familial bonds would be shattered.  Children would again be separated from their parents and watch their mothers who gave birth to them in America, be dragged away from their citizen children, while the Joseph Goebbels of Trumpworld, Stephen Miller, executes his heartless, compassionless agenda while “Haitian immigrants feast on cats and dogs.” That said, the border should be secured, and criminals should be sent packing.  Harris has said she will correct that error.

 

Putin and XI and Kim Jong Un are rooting for Trump.  Our NATO allies are not.

 

Apologists for Trump such as Ben Shapiro, divine that Trump will not do what he says, that he only says things to gain leverage.  “Watch what he does, not what he says,” says Shapiro.   The problem is that not believing a proto fascist is dangerous.  41 of the 44 high government officials who worked for him, including a four-star Marine general, John Kelly, and Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say that he is unfit, dangerous and unhinged, unable even to understand a briefing.  These are serious nonpartisan 

people.  And the advisors he selects this time will be sycophants.  Trump will be unbound.  Heaven help us.

Church, Tribes and State 2024.

  

 

My father told me once, quoting Disraeli, that “the secret to success is constancy of purpose.”

Well, if this election cycle is successful, it will have succeeded in driving Americans mad.  And I mean mad in the bonkers sense, not the angry sense as is commonly misused in American parlance.

 

Chiefly, the assault on our senses by the media, social networks, and our friends, some of whom have become so deranged by the onslaught of opinion, misinformation, disinformation and rumor, we have algorithmically relegated to the trash bin, among solicitations from Amazon, Vitamin Shoppe and LA Fitness.  We have set our email systems to tune them out.

 

I do not know how to make sense of the motivations of those Americans who still support MAGA Republicans, although I have been fed a diet of many opinions by journalists, friends and even clergy.  Clergy have not much else to ruminate about these days since most of them can no longer argue, except to true believers, that God or some facsimile thereof, still exists.  I think the most recent information reflects that only 50% of the public has expressed certainty that God is still up there on a cloud answering our prayers, his white beard festooning the heavens.

 

In view of the fact that a majority of the founding fathers were deists rejecting the efficacy of prayer, but believing in some form of divine creation, but non-intervention in human affairs, it is even more difficult to discern why evangelicals and other fundamentalists, including conservative Catholics, believe in all the recent steps taken by the current Supreme Court as some form of progress in the 1789 constitutional experiment. 

 

Abortion is one of the issues advanced by religious fundamentalists.  That issue has riven the country, and although Donald Trump, as a candidate who lost the popular vote by three million in 2016, appointed three religious zealots to the Supreme Court who lied to congress in their confirmation hearings and later overturned abortion rights that had been in place for over 52 years, resulting in life threatening social consequences. That Trump really had no popular mandate did not disturb him or Mitch McConnell a bit.

 

Religion (tribalism, I use the term interchangeably)) has prospered in this country because of the wall of separation between church and state, not in spite of it.  There exists no state religion, as in Europe, the flight from which was a guiding ideal of the pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. That freedom was later affirmed by the founders.  Massachusetts and Maryland and Rhode Island, for example, were settled by different religious factions.  But back then there was no national consensus, no modern exchange of information, no telegraph, no internet exposing people to differing points of view.  There were local newspapers, but they did not widely circulate.

 

The irony of the separation of church and state being under attack by fundamentalists lays waste to the ideal that religion has been beneficial to our polity.  Yes, there has been benefit, in social order and morality, but these days, on balance, it is challenging to accept that it is a positive force.  It is too subject to manipulation by unscrupulous politicians who have no sincere religious beliefs, but instead, are guided by transactional agendas.  

 

I am clinging to the hope that the American public will not fall for the siren call of a charlatan who has fooled them once.  The electoral college is another creation of 1789 that compromised democratic ideals to slave states which, among other rationales, reasoning that the bible conferred authority to enslave other human beings.  As a result, about 80 years after the founding, a great civil war tore at the sinews of the nation, partially to cure the biblical notion that slavery was endorsed by a divinity. Lincoln himself did not subscribe to traditional Christian beliefs, but instead to a complex philosophy of rationalism and fatalism, allowing him to evolve and eventually eschew the doctrinal justification of slavery existing in the old and new Testaments (as have some modern theologians who now define slavery differently.)

 

Let us not think that religion or tribalism did not play a part in strongly contributing to that war, and many other wars, crusades, pogroms and inquisitions as well, including the inescapable notion that if Jews were Muslims or Muslims were Jews there would be no war in the Middle East.  And take it a step further. No Holocaust predicated on 2000 years of liturgy that Jews killed Christ.                                                                                                   

Solving the Mystery of Donald Trump

 “I don’t understand how anyone can support Donald Trump.  How can people be that stupid? How can people vote against their own interests?”

There is no mystery.  Donald Trump is no mystery at all.

Anger, frustration and fear are blowing in the wind; or else Donald Trump would have disappeared years ago. We know that.  But fear is the sine qua non of button pressing, the go to argument for persuasion.  Or for anyone.  Almost anyone who wants to win an argument or pass a point of view.

 When I was trying cases before juries, the most persuasive arguments were to what the noted trial lawyer Don Keenan emphasized in his book, “The Reptile,” was fear. That book became a phenomenon in legal circles, virtually assuring that a larger verdict would be forthcoming if appropriately utilized in the right case.

The philosophy of the book is that juries or people do not really care what happens to others, but instead, care about themselves in the context of a community. A tribal ethos of self-preservation, an evolutionary protection. And for a long time, it worked in primitive hunter-gatherer societies.  In the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years of humankind there has been only ten thousand years since the dawn of agriculture, an evolutionary nanosecond to adapt to a civil society. Our genetic makeup does not work that fast.

About five thousand years ago, there arose a priestly class, arrogating to itself the power to control its peers by manipulating fear of divine anger and retribution.  These priests quickly learned how to usurp the previously direct individual connection primitives had with the spirit world, say, for example, dancing around a fire to comfort their fear of enemies, of famine, of the elements, of a harsh and unforgiving world of predator and prey.

Now the primitives could be told how to live their lives, pay homage to priests, and live in a community governed by an organized religion devoted to protecting them from harm, assuming they lived according to the rules. Among those rules was a rule book, (the bible) tribal markings, brandings, nose rings, circumcision, denoting those who belonged to the tribe and denoting outsiders as hostile, worthy of exile, death or even extermination.

One need only look to the blood-soaked twentieth century to see the workings of fear.  Fear of Jews, Communists, Blacks, Non-Catholics, Catholics, Asians, Non-Aryans, Socialists, Liberals, Atheists, Protestants, pick one. If one goes back five hundred years or five thousand years, it does not matter.  Humanity is rife with fear. 

So, when people ask why Donald Trump has been successful in being elected to the Presidency of the United States of America and are confounded by his still large following, the answer is fear.  Trump has mastered the art of manipulating fear and turning it into a cult, the religion of Trumpism. Fear of others.

When Trump talks about eliminating “vermin” from our midst, that statement alone should have been disqualifying.   But it has not been.  Because people fear vermin.  People visualize rodents as loathsome, just as they did when Dr. Goebbels portrayed Jews as rats in his propaganda.  Just as members of his tribe did nothing to speak out against the calumny.

So, Trump has become a high priest, a pied piper to his followers. Just drink the potion, the snake oil. You cannot argue with religion.  In a way, most religions are cultish.  They leave their initial cultishness behind with the passage of time.  The older the religion becomes, the more acceptable it becomes, the less of a cult it is, the more it assuages fear.

People adhering to strict tribal customs perhaps do themselves and their community a service, but in rejecting the more widely acceptable customs of a society also isolate themselves from a more fearful, cosmopolitan (yes I use that word) point of view.  More accepting of others. They inhabit a more insular world, more obvious in their differences and thus more of a target for hatred and prejudice.  The answer to that is not clear. I imagine the answer could be a more tolerant society.  But that is rare, and it seems  that more illiberal societies arise in a time of immense technological and economic change, a more challenging time.  A time more susceptible to Trumpian demagoguery and fear.  Trump has mastered the art of manipulating fear.  The fear of change. The need for scapegoats.

So, Trump is no mystery at all.  Trump is fear itself.  FDR’s “nameless, unjustified, unreasoning terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” So when Franklin Roosevelt worked to overcome fear in America, Trump has worked to restore it mightily to his own advantage, but to the disadvantage of his countrymen.

 

 

Better Governance

 

Those who say that we must reduce the rhetoric of violence causing further acts of violence, must ask themselves the question of what has exacerbated the violence of an already violent and gun infused society.  Seems like we need a new form of governance—a more enlightened form of governance.  Smarter, more humane leaders. Not necessarily humans, though.  I’ll get to that in bit.

 

No one individual has done more to stoke the fires of hatred than Donald Trump.   He has sowed the wind, but by a turn of his head, missed reaping the whirlwind.  If he is re-elected, as he now almost certainly will be, strapping on seat belts will not be enough to be sucked from the improperly bolted airplane.  He’s the orphan pleading for mercy after he killed his parents.

 

Some say the dysfunction of our government and political system is on the verge of dealing with chaos of unspeakable magnitude and is no longer capable of governing.

 

Those who believe the demagoguery of “leaders” who recently said that Democratic persecution of Trump is responsible for the heated political climate, must look to themselves.   JD Vance says it is the Democrats fault for calling Trump a threat to democracy.   (JD wants to write another elegy—this time as vice president.)

 

That truth is not forthcoming in social media, in the mainstream press, nor in the heated oratory of political office seekers.  We are losing the battle for effective leadership.

 

The struggle between good and evil, the moral battles of mankind are no newer than humanity itself, and it is just the present moment that makes it seem most acute.  It must have been just as urgently felt in 1861, in 1941, and in 1968.  

 

If it is true that the evil that men do lives after them and that the good is interred with their bones, the potential assassin’s poor aim will have made no difference.  If Trump had been killed, as many of those baser instincts of his enemies desired, it would have magnified his martyrdom although it is an open question of without their dear leader they would have had as much cohesion.

 

Trump does not belong in the pantheon of martyrdom:   Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy—all victims of the American malaise, violence and a frontier mentality that still accommodates the expediency of evil.  The same ruthlessness that built our country yet saved Western democracy.   The contradictions of humanity as reflected in the American psychosis, all corrupted, anachronistically governed by a failing political system and anchored by decrepit institutions and gerontologic leaders.  

 

The frustrations and rage of Americans seem particularly strong at this moment.  To those who think that the rhetoric from both sides is morally equivalent, perhaps the “threat to democracy” cries are overwrought.   To those who think that the threat to democracy is very real, must ask if speaking out against the perceived evil of our fellow Americans will aid our nation recover and glide past the current crisis. Edmund Burke to the rescue.

 

While it is true that political assassinations have altered the course of history, the effects of those assassinations have caused wars, changed the political dynamic of nations, but mostly not for the better.   The boils and blisters remain.   Poverty, ignorance, prejudice, and hatred.

 

The technological changes occurring now have increased exponentially both the processing speed of AI and the degradation of human dialogue, people no longer communicating with each other, looking at screens for instant gratification, and listening to shallow snippets of misinformation, incomplete information, or siloed opinion.

 

So, finally, is it worse now than in the past?   Optimists think not.  Statistics contradict the perceptions.  Less poverty, a higher literacy rate than 100 or even 25 years ago.  Each of us carrying a supercomputer in our pockets, medical advances extending human life, science working to combat climate change, new sources of renewable energy.

 

All the contradictions of humanity, religion, tribalism still remain, but are we on a better path?  Depends on your point of view.   If as Stephen Hawking predicted, humans are engineering their own demise, if AI will replace most professions, are we headed to a Faustian end?  Maybe not.

 

All this anger and argument reminds me of McEnroe violently arguing over the line calls; this was eliminated by electronic line calling.  Why not the same result for political discourse, clearly not capably handled by people?

 

Could properly designed algorithms replace Congress?   Certainly, the combined intelligence of those in Congress cannot compete with a computer that can defeat the complicated board game “Go.”  The luddite Supreme Court could be replaced by a more enlightened AI to render more humane, well-researched, enlightened decisions.   Most certainly the office of the President of the United States could be better served by an ageless cloud-based decision maker not subject to cognitive decline, narcissism, self-enrichment or  gilded toilets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deus ex Machina, please!

 

The country I know and love is at a critical crossroad.  Will the conservative majority confer immunity for crimes committed by a rogue president attempting to subvert the votes of 80 million Americans who had voted for the current president?   Will it carve a new exception for the schemes of those who would arrogate power to themselves, contrary to the will of the people?  Will it delay the DC election subversion trial that should already have been underway by throwing oil on the bonfire of Trump’s vanity?

These questions and more rock the nation.  More importantly, will the American voter decide that the kind of country we become—a nation that has cast aside the rule of law, one that coronates a King? 

Frightened as I was to listen to the oral arguments presented to the court by Trump’s unapologetic lawyers, that fright was exponentially increased by the pandering Justices, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch asking questions of the advocates so far distant from the issue before them, advancing a false narrative, upon which they could construct an opinion to further delay the DC election subversion trial. 

How quickly they forget—the speech on the floor of the US Senate by Mitch McConnell, after hypocritically voting not to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial, gaslighting the nation, stating that Trump would be held accountable by the criminal justice system.  Never mind putting the country through the ordeal under which it now suffers. Any other candidate, a patriot, (as did Al Gore, and even Richard Nixon in 1960, in a tightly contested elections, would have stepped aside for the good of the country.)  Not Trump. 

We could have had a normal GOP candidate whose policies with whom one might legitimately disagree, running for President, debating the issues instead of the nightmare scenario of Trump brazenly standing before his throngs crying “retribution.” McConnell now says he will support Trump, if he is nominated, even after recognizing Trump’s corrupt and even treasonous enterprise. 

Norms are what our country runs on.  Cuba, for example, had a written constitution modeled after our own.  We know how that worked out.  Norms that are abandoned or shredded fall to the famous Benjamin Franklin remark when asked by a bystander when he emerged from the constitutional convention in 1789.   “What did you do Dr. Franklin?” He responded, “We give you a Republic, if you can keep it.”

We do not yet know how the court will rule, but they have already given Trump a leg up and if they do not rule quickly, voters may not have the information needed to make an intelligent decision.    

Democrats need far more votes to win than Republicans, because of the bizarre and antiquated electoral college, the US Senate, and the gerrymandered House of Representatives.   Candidates with a minority of the popular vote should not win elections.  It is not democratic.  It is not fair, and it adds to the public discord and the notion that the rich and powerful, the landed gentry (in our times the billionaire class) is favored, is preeminently privileged, is controlling the discourse, and again the Supreme Court, in allowing dark money flowing freely swaying elections, is again throwing a judicial get out of jai free card to Trump. Of this injustice, nations fall.

In Florida, Democrats see that their votes in a Presidential election do not matter, because of winner take all electoral votes.   Florida should consider rank choice voting and award proportional allocation of the vote to each candidate.  And nationwide, the electoral college should be repealed or a state compact awarding all the votes of each state to the winner of the national popular vote.  Too hard to amend the constitution.

No more minority popular vote presidents. No more battleground states.  No more wasting millions of dollars on politicians jetting around when they should be doing their jobs.  Just a few debates on television.  No more two- year riving presidential election process.  No more Iowa caucuses.  Just an election of the nominees selected in a national primary followed by an election six or so weeks later.  These reforms would also lead to less divisiveness, something of which we sorely need.

We live in an age of AI, of internet banking, of remote work.  Of great technological change.  Let’s get with the program.

America, let us please reform our anachronistic, creaky, outdated, elections system.  

 

 

 

Democracy in America

 

Mitch McConnell shares the ignominy of Donald Trump for doing more shredding  our democracy than any other of the conservative actors of our time.

McConnell thought Donald Trump was in his political death throes after Trump’s slim escape from conviction in his Senate impeachment trial.  After voting not to convict, McConnell passed the task off to the Justice department, which under Merrick Garland, diddled about prosecuting a clearly criminal insurrectionist and his enraged band of miscreants.  “Trump will be held accountable by the justice system,” McConnell asserted.  Maybe not.  Trump is trying to run out the clock.

When Al Gore lost the election of 2000, the Supreme Court throwing the election to Bush, Gore dutifully stepped aside “for the good of the country.”  How wistful, even naïve, that seems today, one would ever thinking that Trump would ever do anything for the good of the country.  Instead, he puts country through the worst constitutional agonies since the prelude to a civil war in which 700,000 Americans died slaughtering each other. 

In 1857, the Supreme Court issued the infamous Dred Scott decision, denying essentially that black people are humans, instead they are chattels, like cows or dogs.  Roger Taney,  chief justice, owned slaves and was apparently determined to keep them.  His decision was supported by other members of a slave-owner influenced court.

The Taney court was, for the time, a national disgrace, contributing to national anger, the court repealing the Missouri compromise by judicial fiat.  The Missouri compromise was an attempt to balance the entry of slave states with free states entering the Union. Dred Scott enraged abolitionist and popular opinion, eventually electing Abraham Lincoln.

The Roberts court will, in 100 years be looked upon the same way as we look on Taney’s abortionate decision (forgive the pun).  This court has in short order, repealed a woman’s right to reproductive choice, exacerbated the presence of dark money in politics, and arrogated unto itself the rewriting of the 14^th Amendment that had clearly barred insurrectionists from holding office.   Add to this, corrupt practices and gifts received by the justices the largesse of which comes from billionaires having potential interests to be protected by their judicial friends, including Clarence Thomas, whose wife helped fund the festive party at the Capitol on January 6^th.  

And let us not forget the Roberts court’s evisceration of the voting rights act, that had required those great bastions of civil liberties, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi to preclear voting districts to protect minorities.   We have done all the civil rights work necessary, says Justice Roberts, all is well, no further protections needed. 

Justice Samuel Alito, that paradigm of intolerance, cited that a 17^th century precedent in English common law that criminalized the killing of a fetus.  Originalism run wild, authored by a religious zealot. He forgot to mention the burning at the stake part.

The sad part of all of this is that the present court comprises justices appointed by two presidents elected by a minority of American voters.  By a president who lost the popular vote to Al Gore, and a president who lost the popular vote by millions to Hillary Clinton. Abetted by leader McConnell who would not even consider Merick Garland because it was too close to an election, except when it was Amy Coney Barrett, who needed a quick confirmation close to the next election. Public sentiment be damned.  So when one speaks of American exceptionalism, it is in the pejorative sense.  Frank Underwood would be proud.

Moreover, the coming election will have two candidates, neither of whom inspires much confidence.  One is an unhinged criminal defendant trying, with the aid of his judicial friends, to stay out of jail, and the other who projects being feeble and frail.  Perhaps he is not, but that is the popular perception, and perception being reality, these days, you fill in the blanks.  All of this to be decided by a few thousand voters in battleground states. The Electoral College says, why should voters on the coasts where most of the people live have an equal say with rural overrepresented voters?  After all, 500,000 voters in North Dakota should have two senators, just like the 40,000,000 people who live in California.

 That’s the way it was in 1789; it should stay the same in 2024, don’t you think?

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Obsessions

War clouds are festooning over Europe. 

 In August 1914, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, famously said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” announcing the beginning of the Great War. 

After losing in 1918, Germany was forced to disarm and pay backbreaking reparations to the Allies under the Versailles Treaty. This planted the seeds of the next war. 

In anger over the treaty, Hitler obsessed with Germany’s defeat, stoking public opinion, playing the humiliation of the German volk, incorporating it in his rise to power, marked by enormous illegal rearmament. Territorial demands followed.  In 1939, came the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II.

Vladimir Putin is also obsessed--with Russian humiliation by the greatest tragedy of his life:  The collapse of the Soviet Union.  This low-down KGB blood-soaked thug rose to the pinnacle of power in a country that never enjoyed democratic traditions. A thousand years of authoritarian culture-- Czars, Bolsheviks, and now a pitiless dictatorship.

Putin’s agenda is as clear as a moonlit night on a mountaintop.  He craves weakening NATO, perhaps invading a small NATO country like Lithuania, daring the west to challenge him.  He wants to expand his empire to enhance his flailing economy.  Poles are terrified.  Lithuanians, too.  They think the United States will not come to their aid if they are attacked.  It might not. If Ukraine falls, they are next. Maybe us too.

GOP house members are also obsessed.  Their hard right obsesses about impoverished migrants purportedly flooding the country; they want to trade crucial aid to Ukraine as though it were some sick parlor game.  House Republicans obsess how they can support an unhinged criminal defendant in his own obsession--staying out of jail.

In 1938, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons, presciently obsessing that failure to rearm would lead to war.  No one listened.  He was a warmonger.  Instead, Neville Chamberlain, obsessed with “peace in our time,” naively signed the Munich agreement giving away the Sudetenland; one year to the date before Hitler invaded Poland, starting the bloodiest war in history. 

Europe faces a new fascist threat, the murderous Vladimir Putin, beginning to reverse his initial failures in Ukraine.  European leaders are panicking.   Europe has not rearmed, nor has it mobilized. War is coming without more force to stop a revanchist Russia, with a leader whose Czarist obsessions are both pathological and propelled by his other obsession--being deposed or assassinated. 

Germany needs to massively rearm and to possibly institute conscription.  France as well. They need to exponentially increase defense expenditures.  Some experts think it will take 5 years to reach parity and by then it might be too late.  Russia has one thing Ukraine has not.  Overwhelming manpower.  The same manpower that overwhelmed Hitler’s legions.  The same manpower that defeated Napoleon.  If Ukraine falls, war will surely come to us. 

Any Russian opposition is crushed by an avalanche of propaganda and fear. Navalny murdered.  Others tossed out windows, shot, poisoned, wings falling off their airplane.  Putin’s agenda is audacious, abetted by perverted congressional politics and Trumpian attention to his own criminality.

Putin sees NATO as a threat to his imperial ambitions.  He seeks to destroy the alliance which has preserved the world order since the end of World War II.  With Trump’s help that could happen.

The US should immediately pass the aid to Ukraine Bill, which only represents 2-3% of our defense budget.   Not likely to happen, but reinstitution of military conscription in the US and in Europe could send a strong signal to Moscow. 

This sounds alarmist, but Lenin himself said, “Push forward the bayonet.  If you find steel, pull back.  If you find soft flesh, push forward.”

Lenin is Putin’s hero.  The free world should obsess about that.